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REVELATION

1. The question stated.—Few theological or philosophical problems have received keener and more industrious examination than the problem which is suggested to us by the word ‘revelation.’ Does the word stand for any real disclosure of His secrets by the Eternal? Does God stoop to unveil His face to men? And if He does, what is the mode of such manifestations? What are the conditions under which we may believe that a revelation has been given? Is there any room in a rational scheme of the Universe for a revelation? It is pointed out, on the one hand, that every great religion has been promulgated in the faith of its adherents that its message was a veritable message from heaven, and not merely a well-reasoned theory about life; while, on the other hand, it is a part of the claim of Christianity that the revelation of God in Christ is unique and final. ‘Comparative Religion’ has reached the dignity of a science, and it will not allow us to pass by the non-Christian religions of the world with a mere phrase of patronizing criticism or approval; while the teaching of the Christian creeds will not allow us to regard our own religion as only one among the many in which men have sought and have found their God. And, within the last half-century, a yet more searching question has been suggested by the scientific view of man’s gradual development in mental and moral, as in physical, stature, which dominates at this moment all scientific investigation. Is not revelation rather a gradual disclosure than a sudden unveiling? And may it not be that what men have taken for an act of God should rather be described as an acquisition on man’s part which came to him, as all natural knowledge has come, by the gradual quickening of his spiritual faculty, in response to the discipline of life!* [Note: This is, seemingly, the view taken in Canon Wilson’s essay on ‘Revelation and Modern Knowledge’ (Cambridge Theological Essays, p. 229 ff.).]

These are among the largest and most momentous questions on which the human mind can be engaged. It would require encyclopaedie knowledge to answer them fully, and only the briefest treatment is possible here. But it may help to prepare the way for an answer if we examine the aspects under which the idea of revelation is set forth in the NT, and the presuppositions which it is necessary to make before the questions that have been rehearsed can be clearly apprehended. We cannot entertain the idea of a Divine revelation without making certain large assumptions as to God and man of which it is well to remind ourselves at the outset. They are all assumed in the NT.

2. Presuppositions.—(a) First, then, we take for granted the central fact of life—the fact that God is a living Being, Merciful and Just: that ‘God is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him’ (Hebrews 11:6). One must begin somewhere, and we begin here. That is, we assume that, supposing God’s creatures to be capable of understanding His purpose in Creation, He is capable, on His part, of making it known to them. He is the Giver of all good things, the Author of all knowledge; and we recognize that the highest of His gifts may be the knowledge of His will and the stimulus of His grace. (b) To say this implies, secondly, that there is a certain capacity in the recipients of such Divine communications. No one will maintain that the Eternal Spirit could thus reveal Himself to the brutes; for, to be sure, a revelation is limited by the capacity of those to whom it is addressed. Revelation, as Maurice said, is always the unveiling of a person; and a revelation can be made to personal beings only in terms of personality.

Thus far, no assumption has been made which is peculiar to Christianity. The thesis is simply this: that whatever difficulties are found in believing that men could appreciate a revelation, there is no difficulty in believing that God could give them one, if He be indeed alive. Whether man could securely recognize it as revelation, and not as a mere discovery of new truth, is another question, to which we shall return later. All that is here asserted is that God may communicate with man. If He be a Personal Being, communication with Him is possible. This is the first principle of all religion worthy of the name.

(c) We assume, in the third place, that as revelation is thus possible, it may also be described as probable. Creation involves responsibility for the creature, and thus there is a probability that He who made the world will continue to guide it. Mankind is not perfect, and it is not doubtful that the progress of the race towards holiness and truth would be made easier by the grace of heaven bringing light and life.^{† [Note: This is the thesis expounded by Butler (in opposition to Tindal and the Deists of his day) at the beginning of Part ii. of the Analogy: ‘To say Revelation is a thing superfluous, what there was no need of, and what can be of no service, is, I think, to talk quite wildly and at random.’]} To assert that revelation is probable is then only to assert that God has pity for human weakness, and that it is not His will that it should be left unaided to perish.

3. Aspects of idea of revelation.—We have now to consider the aspects under which the idea of revelation^{‡ [Note: The word ἀποκάλυψις occurs in the Gr. OT (e.g.} 1 Samuel 20:30^, Sirach 11:27^; Sirach 22:22^; Sirach 4:21^{), but never in the sense of a Divine communication.]} is presented in the NT. There are, as it seems, two lines of thought in St. Paul about this great matter which we must try to distinguish. Sometimes he speaks of Divine revelation in terms which would be acceptable to every believer in a spiritual religion; at other times he uses language which can be interpreted only if we remember that to him Jesus Christ was a supreme, a unique, a final revelation of the character of the Eternal God. We may take these separately, although they are quite consistent.

4. Revelation in general.—There is a sense in which all religion must presuppose a revelation—that is, the unveiling of His purposes by the Supreme, and the response with which He meets the aspirations and the yearnings of human souls. No religion, e.g., can live which does not encourage and justify the habit of prayer, which does not claim that prayer is heard and answered. In other words, all religion presupposes not only movements of the human spirit towards God, but also a movement of the Divine Spirit towards man. And in every age, and by men of every religious creed, it has been believed—and we cannot doubt that the belief was well founded—that God enters into holy souls and makes known to them His will. In every age and place men have realized His providence, have believed that the Eternal manifests Himself in the world. Now this manifestation may be either ordinary or extraordinary; by which it is not intended here to suggest any distinction between what is natural and what is supernatural. That distinction may not be tenable, for we do not know all the possibilities of nature, and so do not know what may be above it. But what is meant is that there are two distinct kinds of experience, in which men become assured that God is speaking to them—one the commonplace, everyday routine of life, and the other the experience of rare moments of high spiritual exaltation.

(1) Multitudes of religious men have felt, as they looked back upon the past, that their course was ordered from the beginning by an unseen hand, that a Providence has guided them into the paths which were prepared beforehand for them to walk in, and they have been enabled to perceive in the opportunities of life the calling of a Divine voice. They have felt, moreover, that this is the only intelligible interpretation of life; and that without this revelation—for such it is—of its meaning, life would be chaos, and the secret of the future a dreadful and portentous enigma. The light by which they walk is ‘the light which lighteth every man,’ and they rejoice in the illumination which it sheds upon their path. Some of the most saintly lives that the world has seen have been lived in the strength of the conviction that the changes and chances, as others call them, of the years are but the unveiling of a Divine face; and that the vision of God becomes brighter when seen through the mists of pain. This is the belief of those men and women among us who have the best right to be heard; their spiritual emotions are not altogether born of their own patient hopes; they are due to the stirring of the Divine Spirit, and the stimulation of the Divine Life; they are a revelation of the unseen.

(2) And to such souls there come rare moments of spiritual ecstasy and exaltation, when they are filled with an overpowering conviction of the presence of God, of His Will for them, of His Will for others. Such a moment it was in the life of St. Peter when he reached the supreme conviction of his life, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matthew 16:16); and we have the highest of all authority for the source of his inspiration: ‘Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.’ Such a moment came to St. John at Patmos when, being ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s day’ (Revelation 1:10; cf. Revelation 4:2), he heard the Heavenly voice pronouncing judgment on the Churches, and saw in a vision the Heavenly figure which is always standing unseen in their midst. Such a moment came to St. Paul when the vision of the Christ at the gates of Damascus changed the whole course of his carcer; ‘it pleased God to reveal his Son in me’ (Galatians 1:16) is his description of the experience. And again and again St. Paul refers the certainty of his convictions to the fact, which is for him indisputable, that they reached him by revelation. The ‘mystery of Christ,’ as he calls it, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs of the gospel—this was ‘made known’ to him ‘by revelation’ (Ephesians 3:3). The gospel which he preached came to him, he writes to the Galatians, ‘not from man, but through revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1:12). Such were the revelations of which he wrote, while there were yet others which he counted too intimate, too sacred, to commit to words, as when he says that he ‘was caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter’ (2 Corinthians 12:4). It was one of St. Paul’s deepest convictions that to him were revealed at times from heaven thoughts greater than his own; so sure is he of this, that he is careful on occasion to explain that all his utterances have not the same supreme authority. ‘The things which I write, they are the commandment of the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 14:37). So he says of one subject. Concerning another, ‘I have no commandment’ (1 Corinthians 7:25) is his prelude, although he concludes, ‘I think that I have the Spirit of God’ (1 Corinthians 7:40). But he is sure that the Divine message has been disclosed to him in a fashion which may be sharply distinguished from the ordinary ways in which knowledge is acquired. Human wisdom is not identical with Divine wisdom; so he warns the Corinthians, as he quotes the ancient words, ‘Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God hath prepared for them that love him’; and declares, ‘Unto us God revealed these things’—not the secrets of the future, but the secrets of the present—‘these things God revealed through the Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 2:9-10).

These and similar passages show beyond doubt that the NT saints, and St. Paul in particular, were quite convinced that God at times reveals His secrets—His mysteries—to a devout and earnest spirit; and that this revelation is consciously recognized by the soul as distinct from the discovery of a Divine purpose in life, or the assurance of Divine guidance, which are reached by patient striving after the highest things. The one is the experience of all good men; the other is the portion of the saints, the elect to whom a fuller disclosure of the Divine will is made. It is the portion of the prophets, the ‘seers,’ to whom the ‘word of the Lord’ speaks with an irresistible authority. Yet in both cases—in the ordinary and the extraordinary experiences alike—there is not only a movement of the human soul towards God, but a movement of the Divine love towards man. We generally keep the word ‘revelation’ for the extraordinary or abnormal experiences; and there is no objection to this restriction, provided we understand that in neither case does man’s spirit act without response or without stimulation from heaven. But this it is essential to bear in mind. ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you’ (John 15:16) are words of universal application.

We have now to interpose with an inevitable question. What is the test by which we may assure ourselves that the imaginings of pious souls are not merely of subjective value, that is, that they are anything more than the expression of discontent with the limitations of human knowledge and of human life? What is the test, or is there any test, by which we may ‘try the spirits’ (1 John 4:1), by which we may convince ourselves or others that a true revelation of the Divine will and purpose has been vouchsafed? The theology of the 18th cent. did not hesitate in its answer to this question. The answer was found in the word miracle. Miracles were the appropriate credentials of revelation, which could not be guaranteed as objectively valid without them. Paley and Butler and their successors do not delay to prove this; it seems to them beyond dispute. And forty years ago Dr. Mozley put forward the same view in a well-known passage in his Bampton Lectures (On Miracles, p. 15): ‘The visible supernatural is the appropriate witness to, the outward sign of, the invisible supernatural—that proof which goes straight to the point; and, a token being wanted of a Divine communication, is that token.’ Taking this view of miracles and of revelation, it has been sought to distinguish natural from revealed religion by the circumstance that miraculous signs are not needed to guarantee the truth of the former, which commends itself at once to man’s reason, while they are necessary to confirm our belief in the doctrines of the latter, which are not discoverable by our unassisted faculties, and which may be surprising and even unwelcome to faith.

This is a view which presents many difficulties, clear-cut and definite as it seems. (i.) It is impossible to distinguish sharply natural from revealed religion, because, in fact, all religions have presupposed a revelation, an unveiling of the Unseen Realities. ‘Natural religion,’said Guizot (Méditations, ii. 237), ‘exists only in books.’ In all religion there must be a reciprocal communication between man and God; there must be not only man’s aspiration heavenward, but heaven’s benediction earthward. And this latter is in its measure a revelation. (ii.) It is true that a revelation of new truths requires to be certified to the intellect as valid, but it is not the anomalousness or the inexplicability of the circumstances in which it is given that supplies such certificate; it is their significance. A ‘sign’ need not necessarily be ‘miraculous’ (see art. ‘Sign’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible ), although it may have this character (see ‘Miracle,’ ib. vol. iii. § 5). The context, so to speak, of revelation helps to disclose its meaning and purpose, and thus enables us to refer it to its true author; but the significance of the context may depend upon concurrences and combinations, none of which, taken separately, need be abnormal or even unusual. (iii.) The revelation itself may be conveyed by these ‘signs’ which in fact constitute it. The σημεῖα of the Gospels are vehicles, or media, or instruments of revelation quite as much as evidential adjuncts. Their interpretation leads to new thoughts of God and man, undiscoverable, or at any rate undiscovered, without them; and thus it is that ‘signs’such as the resurrection of Christ (which would be classed as miraculous) or the moral beauty of His life (which some would not regard as necessarily a miracle) form the premises of Christian theology (cf. Westcott, The Gospel of Life, p. 80). They unveil the Divine love, and power, and holiness; and they are accepted as true revelations, in part because of the existing testimony to them as historical facts, but in part also because they find a response and a welcome in men’s hearts. Such revelations serve to unify the bewildering experiences of life, and provide a means of co-ordinating our thoughts about the highest things. That is to say, in brief, they are accepted as true because they are coherent with our spiritual experience, while at the same time they enlarge its boundaries and illuminate its dark places.

Thus the question, What is the ultimate test of revelation? is not to be answered merely by pointing to miracle as its guarantee. It is part of a much larger question, What is the ultimate test of truth? And to this there is only one answer: experience (cf. Wilson, l.c. p. 242), either individual or general; that is the one unfailing test of opinion in every department of human life.

(α) First, as to the experience of the individual. That, in the region of the spirit, is not capable of transference from one to another, and—in so far—it can be valid only for him who has had the experience. But for him the sense of ‘realized fellowship with the unseen’ (cf. Westcott, l.c. p. 83) is so vivid and so vital that he cannot call it in question. He is conscious not only of the strivings of his own soul, but of a response from the spiritual world. And if it be urged that, after all, it would be impossible for him to be sure of this, so subtle and deep-seated are the movements of the soul, his only reply can be that he is sure of it. He is able to distinguish, he will tell you,—for St. Paul’s experience here is not singular or even unusual,—between the convictions which he has reasoned out for himself and those which have presented themselves to him with an irresistible authority from without. And he will point, in justification, to what is an admitted fact of mental life, viz., that our powers of discovery are no true measure of our powers of recognition. We can all recognize as true, and as obviously true, many a principle, or law, or fact, when it is once brought before our notice, which we should have been quite incapable of discovering for ourselves.* [Note: This is fully admitted by so thoroughgoing a Rationalist as Kant: ‘If the Gospel had not taught the universal moral laws in their purity, reason would not yet have attained to so complete a knowledge of them; although, once they are there, we can be convinced through pure reason of their truth and validity’ (Letter to Jacobi in Jacobi’s Werke, iii. 532).] And it has been the deep-seated belief of the saints that their most cherished and intimate convictions were such as they could never have reached had they not been guaranteed to them by a message from the spiritual world.

(β) But, it will be said, there can be nothing trustworthy in such merely individual convictions. To claim to be in possession of a revelation from heaven is one of the commonest symptoms of mental disorder; and those who make such claims most persistently are the most intractable patients in asylums for the insane. There is, unhappily, no doubt of it. The mystical spirit is divorced, in too many cases, from any just sense of the logic of facts; and incapacity to judge aright of things temporal is often combined with an eager and extravagant judgment upon things eternal. It may be—we do not know—that sometimes a true vision of the spiritual order has proved too much for a brain intellectually feeble, and that the mental powers have been permanently injured by too great an effort being demanded of them. And—conversely—it is undoubtedly true that when the brain fails to do its work, whether from disease, or overstrain, or other causes, the man ceases to be able to distinguish fancies from facts, both in the physical and the spiritual world. But to conclude, therefore, that all alike who have claimed to have had visions of the spiritual order, or who believe that God has answered their prayers directly, are necessarily insane, would be a strangely perverse and illogical inference. Indeed, experience suggests a quite different generalization. Despite these abnormal cases, the men of spiritual insight who see ‘visions,’ who live near to the boundary of the spiritual order, are the truly ‘practical’ men, and achieve most of enduring benefit for the race. The truth is that, taken separately, spiritual experiences cannot be verified by any one except the recipient of them; but they cannot be dismissed as untrustworthy merely because some who claim to have enjoyed them are not very wise.

The spiritual experience of the individual is not transferable—apparently, for it would not be well to dogmatize on such a point—from one to another. So far, then, it does not submit itself to any objective test of its trustworthiness. But when we find, as we do find, that in a large number of cases the individual experiences which are reported or recorded are of an identical character as regards the information which they supply of the spiritual order, they present a phenomenon which is within the reach of scientific investigation. That the Eternal guides human lives and does not permit them to drift aimlessly into the paths which lead nowhere, that He answers prayer, that He supplies counsel and strength—these are not specially Christian convictions, they are shared by countless multitudes who would all offer the same proof of their truth, namely, personal experience. This is a solid fact of human nature which demands recognition. And if such convictions are not entirely mistaken, then the Eternal has in so far given a revelation of His power and of His love. He has intervened in human life; He has given men some insight into His purposes.

The test of truth is experience; experience must count for something when we are examining the widespread belief of mankind that the Eternal reveals Himself in the life of the individual and in the life of the race alike.

We have seen that the general experience of religious men gives identical testimony as to God’s power and willingness to communicate with them in their need. But we saw, too (§ 2), that a certain mental and spiritual capacity must be presupposed in the recipients of any revelation. And, as this grows from age to age in the history of the race, and is by no means equal in all races at the same period, or in all men even of the same race and epoch, it will follow that revelation, if made at all, must be made gradually and progressively, in correspondence not only with the needs but with the capacity of men. We have all learnt the truth of this in regard to the history of the race, and it is unnecessary to dwell upon it. If the minute and careful study of the OT history and literature, which has occupied the best thoughts of so many of our best Christian scholars for 40 years, had taught us nothing but this, we should still have learnt a lesson of the most far-reaching significance—a lesson which is full of hope and inspiration. It is a lesson which is illustrated by the history of every religion in which men have sought to find God; the measure of His grace is their capacity of receiving it, and not any Divine economy by which there is a jealous hiding of His face. And the same is true of the individual soul. It is in correspondence with the gradual quickening of our spiritual faculty that the Divine secret is gradually disclosed. ‘Unto him that hath, to him shall be given’ (Matthew 13:12) is not a paradox of the Divine bounty; it is a law of nature, and therefore of revelation as well. Not all at once can we expect to experience the Beatific Vision, but only in proportion as we grow more and more into the Divine likeness, and learn, through the slow and often disappointing discipline of life, to read the Divine purposes. This is not to evacuate the idea of revelation of its content, and regard our spiritual progress as due entirely to the efforts and strivings of our own souls. These must be present,—there must be a movement on man’s part if he is to reach at last his highest,—but the revelation which is given is not his discovery, but a Divine act of unveiling.

It is the consummation of this progress, both for the individual and for the race, which is portrayed in the vision of the prophet as the moment when ‘the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together,’—not as isolated individuals, but as members of the great company of the saints,—‘they shall see it together: for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it’ (Isaiah 40:5).

5. The revelation of Christ.—So far, we have been considering the idea of revelation in general—the idea of God revealing His will to man—which appears again and again in Scripture, and which has been abundantly justified by the experience of the saints in every age. But nothing has yet been said which is distinctively Christian, or which touches the belief of Christians that in Christ there is a supreme and sufficient revelation of God. If the doctrine of revelation which has been here set forth exhausted the content of the idea, then there would be no place left for that which is specially characteristic of the Christian religion. What has been said about the possibility and the gradual progress of a revelation would apply to other nations as well as to the Jews, for God has never ‘left himself without a witness’ (Acts 14:17). And nothing has been said at all about the revelation of God in Christ, which is the centre of the Christian hope. The passages which were quoted from the NT have a general application. We have now, however, to examine passages of a different character.

St. Paul urges, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, that if the message of the Christ was not understood by the Jews, it was due to their incapacity, not to its obscurity. ‘If our gospel is veiled,’ he says, ‘it is veiled in them that are perishing’ (Acts 4:3), i.e. the fault lies with the hearers, not with the giver, of the message. That is his way of expressing a great principle which we have already considered, that revelation, to be instructive, presupposes a certain mental capacity, a keenness of spiritual vision, in those to whom it is addressed. In the previous chapter of the same letter, St. Paul had urged that the Jews had never recognized the transitory character of the Law which was their discipline; ‘a veil was upon their heart’ (Acts 3:15), which prevented them from seeing that the Law was only a stage in the Divine education of Israel. But, he adds, allegorizing the old story of the veil on the face of Moses, ‘if they turn to the Lord, the veil is removed’ (Acts 3:16), and an open vision is granted. The consummation to which they should look is that ‘the light of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should dawn upon them’ (Acts 4:4). And, in like manner, he points out elsewhere that ‘the law was but a tutor to lead them to Christ’ (Galatians 3:24). ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Romans 10:4), in whom it received a perfect fulfilment. This, indeed, is the burden of the Apostolic preaching, that ‘God, who of old time spoke to the fathers by divers portions and in divers manners, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son’ (Hebrews 1:1). It is not needful to multiply quotations which illustrate this familiar Christian thought—that highly favoured as the Jewish people had been by revelations of the Divine will, yet the complete—the perfect—revelation of God is in Christ.

(1) There is a sense in which it demands no special gift of faith to discern in Christ a revelation such as had not dawned upon the world before. And there are passages in the NT which, taken by themselves, would not go beyond this. He was ‘a prophet, like unto Moses’ (Acts 3:22), although with a clearer, a more urgent message. For the most part, He is represented in the Synoptics as the Great Teacher, strong, wise, and merciful—whose words were powerful to move men towards holiness, and whose teachings shed a new light upon the perplexities of conduct. ‘A new teaching,’ His hearers said; and they were right. The Fatherhood of God, the dignity and supreme value of the spiritual life, the significance of faith, the Catholic sympathy of love (see Wendt, The Idea and the Reality of Revelation, p. 28)—these are truths of which, indeed, there had been anticipations in the prophets, but they were expounded by Him with a lucidity and an authority which distinguished Him at once from all the great teachers of the past. And even if we could get no further than this, the claim of Jesus Christ to be the spiritual Master of mankind would be a claim which we could not lightly neglect. If the utterances of holy men in every age deserve a reverent attention, as expressing convictions born of a true spiritual experience, the words of Christ demand a deeper reverence of submission, for He was—at the lowest—the greatest Master of the spiritual life.

(2) Not even yet, however, have we touched upon those claims of His which mark Him out as unique, those aspects of His life which require us to think of His teaching as differing from other teachings, not only in degree, but in kind. We have not, indeed, to read the Gospels very closely to observe that Jesus Christ claimed to be more than a Teacher, and that His authority was other than that of the greatest of the prophets. He said that He was the Messiah, who was to ‘declare all things’ (John 4:25). He is the Son beloved of the Father, to whom the Father showed all His works (John 5:20). He alone has ‘seen the Father’ (John 6:46); and not only is this vision peculiarly His, but through Him it may be revealed to men: ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:9). These phrases are all taken, it is true, from the Fourth Gospel; but the view of Christ’s Person which they present is not peculiar to St. John, for the common tradition of St. Matthew and St. Luke preserves the tremendous assertion, ‘No man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any the Father, but the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him’ (Matthew 11:27 = Luke 10:22). It is clear that Christ is represented in the Gospels as more than a Teacher of Divine wisdom; He is the Revealer of the Divine character. The matter, the content, of the revelation which He offers to mankind transcends the message of prophets and holy men, in this, that it has to do not merely with man’s relation to the Supreme, with man’s duty and man’s destiny, but with the inmost nature of God. Not only is He an ambassador of Heaven; but He has seen the Father. No such claim as this is made in the record of the most intimate and sacred spiritual history of the saints.

It is this aspect of Christ as the Revealer of God which is indicated in the profound phrases of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel. He is the Word, the Eternal Wisdom; He was ‘from the beginning with God,’ and is God. Revelation is the act of self-manifestation of God to man, and the Word is the eternal expression of Deity, as in Creation at the first, so in the Incarnation when the fulness of time had come. So Athanasius: ‘It was the function of the Word, who, by His peculiar providence and ordering of the universe, teaches us concerning the Father, to renew that same teaching’ (τοῦ γὰρ διὰ τῆς ἰδίας προνοίας καὶ διακοσμήσεως τῶν ὁλων διδάσκοντος περὶ τοῦ Πατρος, αὐτρῦ ἧν καὶ τὴν αὐτγν διδασκαλίαν ἀνανεῶσαι, de Incarn. Verb. Dei, c. 14). The same idea is in Irenaeus: ‘Per ipsam conditionem, revelat Verbum conditorem Deum, et per mundum fabricatorem mundi Dominum, et per plasma eum qui plasmaverit artificem, et per Filium eum Patrem qui generaverit Filium’ (c. Haer. iv. 6). These high speculations are perhaps beyond the modest capacity of human reason, but at all events they are in accordance with the phrases of Scripture, which represent the Word as the Agent of Creation, and as the Expression of the Divine Will. Christ is set before us in the Bible and the Church as the Revealer of the Divine nature and not only as the Revealer of Divine secrets.

It has been urged by some writers that the uniqueness of Christ as Revealer is indicated in the NT by the fact that, while revelation is continually represented as proceeding from Him, it is never represented as given to Him. He is the exponent, not the recipient, of revelation; and is, in a sense, the Revealer and the Revealed (1 Timothy 3:16), both the subject and the object of revelation. This, however, is to use language that strict exegesis does not Justify. ‘The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to show unto his servants’ … (Revelation 1:1), is the view of Christ’s office as Revealer which is presented in the Fourth Gospel as well as in the Apocalypse. Christ describes Himself as ‘a man that hath told you the truth which I heard from God’ (John 8:40); ‘as the Father taught me, I speak these things’ (John 8:28); ‘the Father which sent me hath given me a commandment, what I should say and what I should speak’ (John 12:49).

The distinguishing features of the ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ are, rather: (a) He reveals the inmost nature of God (see above). (b) The revelation to the Son is not intermittent, but continuous and perpetual. ‘The Father showeth him all things’ (John 5:20); ‘himself hath given (δέδωκεν) me a commandment’ (John 12:49), the tense marking the continuance of the action of the command (so Westcott).* [Note: Sabatier has observed (Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion. p. 41) that a phrase in the Gospel according to the Hebrews brings this out well. At the moment of His baptism, the Holy Spirit says to Jesus: ‘Mi Fili, Te exspectabam in omnibus prophetis, ut venires et requiescerem in Te. Tu enim es requies mea.’] (c) All has been revealed to Him. ‘The Father showeth him all things that himself doeth’ (John 5:20). The Son sees all, while we see parts in Him (so Westcott). The revelation which Christ in His own Person gave of the Divine nature is represented as complete; and the task of the Divine Spirit throughout the ages is to assist mankind in the understanding of it (John 14:26), and in the application of it to life. It is not to be understood all at once (John 16:12), nor will it be perfectly apprehended until the Day of Consummation, when the human race shall have fulfilled its destiny, ‘the day when the Son of Man shall be revealed’ (Luke 17:30), the day to which the Apostolic Epistles continually point as the day of ‘the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 1:7, 1 Peter 1:13), for which humanity is to wait in patience and hope.

These quotations have been given at length, because it is this claim of Christ to be the Revealer of the Eternal God, as no other was, which is the centre of the Christian religion, and it is this claim which is felt to be difficult to reconcile with the claims of other religions to the possession of revealed truth. But it will bear repetition that it is no article of the Christian faith that God does not reveal His purposes and His will except in Christ, or that those who seek His face without the knowledge of Christ shall be disappointed of their hope. Wherever and whenever the spirit of man has sought communion with the Eternal Spirit, a response—we must believe—has been given; and such response is, in its measure, a revelation of light and life. By whatever avenues of thought men reach new truth about the highest things, the light which makes their journey possible is a light in the heavens. It was a favourite thought of the early Christian apologists that the aspirations of pagan philosophy after God were prompted and encouraged by the Eternal Word speaking to men’s hearts. ‘Those that have lived with Reason’ (οἱ μετὰ λόγου βιώσαντες), writes Justin Martyr, ‘are Christians, even though they were counted atheists, such as Socrates and Heraclitus and others among the Greeks, and among the barbarians Abraham and the rest’ (Apol. i. 46). That there is always the seed of Divine Reason (λόγος σπερματικός) in man is urged by the same writer more than once: τὸ ἔμφυτον παντὶ γένει ἀνθρώπων σπέρμα τοῦ λόγου (Apol. ii. 8) is a typical utterance. Whatever we may think of the technical phrases of Christian theology used by these writers, we cannot doubt that their main thought was true. God is always revealing Himself to the world. Yet—the question recurs—how then are we to express our belief in a special revelation in Christ, a revelation differing not only in degree but in kind from all that went before? We are so much affected, in this age, by the idea of orderly and continuous progress in nature, and by the idea of the gradual quickening of man’s spiritual faculty, that we find it unwelcome to be presented with the conception of crisis, and with any theory of knowledge or life involving a breach of that rule of continuity by which we are accustomed to guide our thoughts.

6. Recapitulation.—It will be convenient to approach our final answer by re-stating in our modern ways of speech that view of revelation in general, and of the Christian revelation in particular, which seems to be presented in the NT. It is, at any rate, coherent, and is taught by St. Peter as well as by St. Paul, by the Synoptists as well as by St. John. Nor is it out of harmony with the profoundest teachings of science about nature and about man.

The Christian doctrine of God presupposes that He is a Personal Being who lives and acts eternally. We cannot confine His Personal life by the conditions which limit our own; to use the homely phrase of Wm. Law, perhaps the sanest of English mystics, He is really greater than man; He transcends nature, for He is its Author. But He does not stand apart, as it were, from the created life which has issued from Him; He is, as philosophers express it, immanent in nature; He is its Life and its Light. The sun enlightens the earth with its beams, and warms into life the beings with which it is peopled; but the Eternal Spirit is the Life and Light of all creation, and communicates this Life and Light consciously and with a purpose of love. In nature and in history God is always present, always active, always compassionate.

But neither in the field of nature nor in the field of history would it be true to say that the purpose of the Supreme is everywhere clearly revealed. On the contrary, it is for the most part veiled from our eyes. We may speak, indeed, of the Creation itself as a revelation of the Eternal. Perhaps it was an exhibition of that Divine law by which love always seeks an object on which to spend itself, that law which in human life at its noblest always demands sacrifice. Perhaps the law that we only secure our highest life by not attempting to save it received here a stupendous illustration. We cannot tell. But, at any rate, throughout creation, as it is, the Divine love is veiled. In the struggles and competitions of created life, pain and death are the inevitable issue for the weak; in nature it is only the strong that survive. It is a perpetual tax upon faith, in the face of nature’s cruelty, to believe—as nevertheless we do believe—that God cares for the sparrows, and that the meaner creatures of the earth are not beyond the reach of His compassion.

(1) Where, then, in nature is God most clearly seen? There is only one possible answer. It is in man, the highest creature of His that we know; in man, who is unique among the creatures, because he reflects, however dimly, the Divine image in which he was made. Man, indeed, is far removed in fact from that which he was intended to be. Corruptio optimi pessima. His capacity for good, by misuse, has become a capacity for evil, to which the humbler animals cannot sink. That is all true. But even in the most degraded man or woman there is that affinity to the Divine which makes redemption possible. In this seed of goodness, which lingers even in the foulest soul, there is always the hope of the future. It is in this elect creature—this creature chosen to be the highest because the best fitted for the service of the Creator—that God perpetually reveals Himself, as we perceive that love is, after all, stronger than hate. It is to this elect creature—despite his kinship with the beasts, a kinship displayed during every hour of his earthly life—it is to this elect creature, and to him alone, that God deigns to reveal His will,—not perpetually, indeed, but at those too rare moments when the spirit is completely master of the flesh. God is always active in nature; He unveils His face only to the elect of creation, and to the elect individuals of the elect race.

(2) The like is true of the Divine revelation in the field of history. Of the destiny of nations, God is the supreme arbiter. Not theologians only, but historians too, will be found to declare that human history is providentially ordered, that ‘the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men’ (Daniel 4:32). And viewing history on a large scale, that may be the inevitable conclusion. But we cannot say that it is self-evident, or that perplexities do not present themselves to any one who endeavours to trace an eternal purpose in the decline and fall of empires. In the philosophy of history it is not always easy to find certain tokens of a superintending Providence. In history, as in nature, we see such tokens with greater distinctness when the observation is directed to a particular part of the field. The secrets of the Divine rule are disclosed to us most clearly when we recall the history of the Chosen People, the race elect of the Supreme as His instrument for the education of the world. No history reveals the Divine intention in the same degree as the history of Israel. And thus we rightly look upon the Hebrew literature and history as preserving for us in a special manner the revelation of God’s purposes in the education of mankind. This is not to make any arbitrary distinction between sacred history and profane history. All history is sacred, for it is directed and controlled by the Eternal Wisdom. But not in all history alike are we permitted to discern the guidance of God who thus reveals Himself. It is no more anomalous or surprising that the revelation should be explicitly recognized as such only in the history of the elect nation Israel, than that His revelation in nature should be recognized as such only in the character of the elect creature—man. The Divine action is always implicit in nature and in history; both are potential revelations, so to speak, of the Eternal Light and Wisdom, but in neither field does the revelation become actual, save in the chosen organ of the Divine life. Man is not an anomaly among the creatures, nor is Israel an anomaly among the nations; but as man with his reason and power of choice is the best fitted of creatures, and Israel with its genius for religion is the best fitted of the nations, to receive and to impart the revelations of the Divine will, to man and to Israel have they been entrusted in a peculiar degree. The story of revelation is always a story of election (cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 13).

If we can go thus far, we are constrained to go a step farther. For in the Christ is the consummation, the summing up, of humanity. He is the Representative Man. And in the Christ, too, is the fulfilment of Israel’s high destiny as the Servant of Jehovah, the Messenger and Ambassador of the Most High. It is not surprising, then, that He should claim to be the Revealer of the Godhead, in a sense and after a manner unexampled elsewhere. He, too, is the Elect, the Beloved. There is a coherence in the NT account of Christ the Revealer which demands for it a reverent hearing from every thoughtful man, no matter what his belief about historical Christianity may be. We do not assume any breach in the continuity of nature when we hold that a revelation of God may be perceived in man which cannot be perceived in the lower creatures. We do not make history discontinuous if we hold that a revelation of God may be perceived in the record of His dealings with Israel which cannot be perceived in the record of His dealings with Greece, although He is the Supreme Arbiter of the destinies of Israel and Greece alike. To the creature and to the nation uniquely fitted to receive and to reflect a Divine revelation, it has been given, in divers portions and manners, according to the need and the capacity of the recipient. But the Christ stands alone, in nature and in history, the flower of humanity and the culmination of Israel’s hope—alone, for God has become man in Him. There can be no interruption or faltering in the communion between the Perfect Man and God, for He is perfect because He shares the Divine nature itself. The revelation is no longer occasional, but permanent; no longer a gradual unveiling, but the full disclosure of the Father’s face; no longer to be conceived as for one race only, for ‘this is the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest—made known to all nations for the obedience of faith’ (Romans 16:25 f., cf. 1 Corinthians 2:7).

Literature.—Cremer, Bib.-Theol. Lex., s.v. ἀτοκάλυψις; Kaftan, Dogmatik, § 4; Martensen, Chr. Dogm. p. 5 ff.; Ewald, Rev.: Its Nat. and Record; Fairbairn, Christ in Mod. Theol. p. 493 ff.; Flint, Theism, Lect. x.; Luthardt, Fund. Truths of Chty., Lect. vii.; R. H. Hutton, ‘Revelation’ in Theol. Essays; Newman, Oxford Univ. Serm, ii.; Dale, Ephesians, Lect. vii.; PRE [Note: RE Real-Encyklopädie fur protest. Theologic und Kirche.] ^{3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred]} , art. ‘Offenbarung’; G. P. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation; C. Harris, Pro Fide, 274; Sabatier, Outlines of a Phil. [Note: Philistine.] of Rel., bk. i. ch. 2; Bruce, Apologetics, 298; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt, Lect. ii.; A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief; W. Sanday, Inspiration; Illingworth, Reason and Revelation; W. Morgan, ‘Faith and Revelation’ in ExpT [Note: xpT Expository Times.] ix. (1898) 485, 537; M. Dods, The Bible, its Origin and Nature, 61.

J. H. Bernard.